Are your McNuggets McCruel?

PETA wants us to know how our McNuggets come to be.

I remember in high school my best friend came home from a trip to New York and told me she had something at McDonald's that hadn’t hit our local McDonald's yet – Chicken McNuggets. She had such high praise for them and the BBQ dipping sauce that came with them that I couldn’t wait for them to find their way to South Jersey.

They eventually did find their way to my area, and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t know what a McNugget is 20-some years later. The introduction of the Chicken McNugget most likely was the beginning of making McDonalds “the biggest seller of chicken meat in the U.S.” (source: McCruelty.com)

PETA believes that as the biggest seller of chicken meat in our country, McDonald's “has the responsibility — and the ability — to reduce this abuse by demanding that its U.S. suppliers use a less cruel method of slaughter.”

Ten years ago, PETA launched the McCruelty campaign and successfully got McDonald’s to make some basic animal welfare improvements leading to a moratorium on the McCruelty campaign. However, after trying to work with McDonald's for the past nine years to get the company to make additional changes, particularly in the way that chickens are slaughtered for their products, PETA lifted the moratorium and the McCruelty campaign re-emerged this year at McCruelty.com.

In this graphic (but not as graphic as it probably could be) video, we get a glimpse of what chickens that end up as McNuggets (and other products) go through at slaughter. PETA contends that it would cost McDonald’s nothing to demand that their suppliers switch to a far less cruel slaughtering system.